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This thesis investigates a foundational question in the humanities and social sciences: the interplay between individual agency and social structures. By problematising the ontological and epistemological status of the human subject as a self-evident, discrete and bounded entity, this thesis argues for a reexamination of the view that moral agency is necessarily located in a given individual. What is agency if the sense that I am the author of my intentions is born of the system that enables me in the first place? This is the motivating question behind sociology s inception, one that informs a shift in methodological emphasis from the subjective and the particular to the objective and the general. This extension of the empirical methods of science to the study of morality, politics and history not only enlarged the conventional definition of science, but also what being human means. Yet, the challenge of reconciling notions of subjectivity and objectivity is evident in the precarious position that contemporary sociology continues to embody: as neither fully humanities nor fully science. This is often amplified in social scientific accounts that align nature and/or biology with determinism, and humanity with the agency to enact social change. This thesis begins with an extended meditation on the sociological problem of individuation through the works of Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim. As this problem has been taken up in systems science and cybernetics scholarship, a close engagement with three prominent systems theorists, namely, Niklas Luhmann, Gregory Bateson and Cary Wolfe, provides us with a novel means to challenge and reconceptualise received assumptions that underpin the ethics and politics of humanism. These analyses in chapters two to four examine, respectively, the interface between system-environment, neurology-ecology, human-posthuman. This thesis concludes with an empirical case study of sensory substitution, a phenomenon whose manifestation as both a neurological and an ecological condition ...

This volume provides a wide-ranging presentation of F.W.J. Schelling's original contribution to, and internal critique of, the basic insights of German idealism and his and innovative responses to questions of lasting metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, and theological importance.

AbstractPrevious studies showed that word learning is affected by children's existing knowledge. For instance, knowledge of semantic category aids word learning, whereas a dense phonological neighbourhood impedes learning of similar‐sounding words. Here, we examined to what extent children associate similar‐sounding words (e.g., rat and cat) with objects of the same semantic category (e.g., both are animals), that is, to what extent children assume meaning overlap given form overlap between two words. We tested this by first presenting children (N = 93, Mage = 22.4 months) with novel word‐object associations. Then, we examined the extent to which children assume that a similar sounding novel label, that is, a phonological neighbour, refers to a similar looking object, that is, a likely semantic neighbour, as opposed to a dissimilar looking object. Were children to preferentially fixate the similar‐looking novel object, it would suggest that systematic word form‐meaning relations aid referent selection in young children. While we did not find any evidence for such word form‐meaning systematicity, we demonstrated that children showed robust learning for the trained novel word‐object associations, and were able to discriminate between similar‐sounding labels and also similar‐looking objects. Thus, we argue that unlike iconicity which appears early in vocabulary development, we find no evidence for systematicity in early referent selection.

The achievements of Elizabeth Dauphinee's (2013) The Politics of Exile are highlighted by means of two juxtapositions. First, Dauphinee's book invites a contrast to novels because it takes the form of a story. Specifically, Dauphinee's portrait of the vilified 'Serbs' is compared with how the Taliban are treated in Khalid Hosseini's The Kite Runner and Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil. Second, The Politics of Exile is examined as it emerges from Dauphinee's efforts to overcome the limits of her more academic work. The advantages of Dauphinee's approach relative to our standard research are presented along five dimensions: the responsibility of closure, the purpose of narration, the transparency of the message, how the work is shown, and the role of generosity. This article critiques Dauphinee's silence on the purpose of travel. It closes by suggesting what social theory can glean from The Politics of Exile. Social theorists can learn how to theorize more systematically, to weigh the relationship between the form and content in writing more judiciously, and to probe the deeper purposes of our intellectual life-work more fully.